The Village Blog

The ability to communicate well is important—especially in today’s tech-driven world. We’ve all struggled to find meaning in vague text messages, squinted at badly designed blogs in teensy, tiny print and thrown up our hands at awkward, hard-to-navigate websites. When the medium isn’t clear, the message can be hard to understand.

Recently I had coffee with a father, and we started talking about his son’s daily homework requirements from school. For an allotted amount of time, the boy was meant to read a book of his choosing. This particular father encouraged his son to read the Bible during these sessions. It’s a brilliant idea, and it led me to think about how this dad’s suggestion offers both academic and ...

This morning I tweeted out two sentences that were in the sermon I preached this past weekend at The Village. Both sentences were meant to address and serve as an illustration of “white privilege,” the idea that white people, in most cases, have easier paths than most black people.

If a couple is wise, even before they get engaged, they’ll ask their friends and family some big questions of their own. They will seek advice about developing domestic harmony, having a unified vision for financial peace and confirming their theological alignment. They will beg for insight into the melding of diverse backgrounds into a new family. They’ll gauge others’ opinions on the ...

Many know John Newton as the former slave-trader, preacher and author of “Amazing Grace,” but he was also a prolific letter-writer amid the Second Great Awakening. In fact, one of his best means of shepherding was through writing letters. One writer said of him, “They found in him one who had been a worse sinner than themselves and who could enter into their experiences with tenderness and ...

Every human heart desires freedom. Born into a fractured world, we feel the weight of that fracture from very early on. And we fight to find escape from it. The reason I am driven or lazy, the reason I pursue relationships or hide from relationships, the reason I’m honest or I’m a liar is that I am searching for freedom from the things that haunt me, from that gnawing inside of me, from the ...

Ministering at The Village is one of the most joyous things I’ve ever done. I love getting to walk with people through different seasons in their lives. It is a privilege to rejoice with them in the good times and weep with them in the bad times. Due to our location, the most common demographic of people I’m around are couples with children. I don’t have kids yet, so they don’t ask me ...